


the deal i'm making

by formerly_known_as___REDACTED



Category: The Stand (TV 2020), The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Blood and Injury, Doctor/Patient, F/M, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, Morphine Dreams, POV Alternating, POV First Person, POV Third Person, Present Tense, Rescue, Set in 2020, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:34:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29068881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerly_known_as___REDACTED/pseuds/formerly_known_as___REDACTED
Summary: “Hello?”Harold’s eyes fly open.Fuck you, Nadine.Dull white and shedding snowflakes, the sky does a slow and dreamy pirouette.Got guilt, you hell-bred bitch?
Relationships: Harold Lauder/OC
Comments: 5
Kudos: 7





	1. a distraught woman's throat

**Author's Note:**

> because fuck that ending

“Hello?”

Harold’s eyes fly open.

_Fuck you, Nadine._

Dull white and shedding snowflakes, the sky does a slow and dreamy pirouette.

_Got guilt, you hell-bred bitch?_

The outer edges of his vision pop, glitter, shake and shimmer; the hard throbbing in his thigh rolls back up over his consciousness, swells into bursts of burning glass. His forehead tightens. His shoulder lights up, his soft meat squealing around the disturbed bones like a tiny animal snared in electric wire. His teeth grind.

“Hey!”

That disembodied voice drifts overhead, spins in circles; it glides on thermals, climbs up through its own registers to sacrifice precision.

“HEY!”

It’s an alarm, sounding its way through a distraught woman’s throat.

“I see you!”

Harold’s teeth ache in the cold. _For me?_ His unhinged eyes seek out, find the top edge of the highway’s jersey barrier. _Doth those alarm bells toll...for_ me _?_ They shiver toward a flicker of movement. _Well...I’ll be._

“Hey! Down there in the dead tree!”

 _Nine days Odin hung from the tree, pierced through upon his own spear_. Snowflakes stick to Harold’s trembling eyelashes. _Just hanging out, don’t mind me. I’m doin it for the wisdom, yo_.

“Hey! I see you!”

_Not Nadine, then._

Harold’s eyelashes tremble together and he breathes out a sagging gagging breath and his mind sets itself adrift on a self-made darkness.

_For he comes in more forms than his own wolf crow snake woman._

It’s the old woman’s voice; it’s scrounged itself up out of the dusty memory vault he detonated a piano, blew up a house, murdered an entire town to keep shut.

_Wolf...crow...snake and here comes the strutting trapdoor spider, she’s spinning and weaving her bridal silks, a black widow...and why not?_

The pain swoops back up the length of his splayed body, stuffs a shroud in his mouth. He chokes down a wet grunt. Coughs.

 _He--_ Him _, Dark Man of modern myth, the Walkin Dude, that demon-legion stuffed into a Canadian Tuxedo---got all of this out of you with a woman and you didn’t even get to fuck her in the pussy._

“Hey.”

Her voice on top of spilling rocks. In it the launching ruffle of raven’s wings, something jazzy, the smooth mouthfeel of a good smoky whiskey---the crackle of dead twigs gives way under an agile weight. She tunes that voice, a sneaky weapon, her cunning herald, an oath, down into something conversational.

“You alive?”

Harold licks sticky blood off his lips.

 _Her herald...sweet Jesus. Merciful Christ, holy suffering son of God, Harold. You wish. You fucking wish. Not that he’d---_ He’d _\---have anything to do with you now._

“Dead guys don’t cough, so.”

The simple existence of living human ears, his knowledge of their proximity, rouses his blood first; it turns the pump of his heart inside out, shakes it awake until the steady hammering thud in his thigh and the gnawing shriek caught beneath his collarbone launch at one another to duel.

Then...a numbing flood of adrenaline.

Harold’s eyes fly open and the world brightens, all white light turning to crystal.

_\---shhhhh_

A red roar of pain swarms his eyes, breaks open his mind; with cold teeth, it yanks out loops of rational thought. He screams.


	2. this road's dangerous curve

I see him when I find the bike. I’m too far away to peer over the edge, I hurry closer at the glimpse of it, but my mind’s eye works just fine---this busted-up bike says all it needs to.

_Over the side, who knows why, just sorta...flicked there, a booger of someone’s finger or a feral cat convinced it knows how to outrun an engine._

Here’s the wreck of it, a buckled-up frame, that sideways slant, a sprinkling of glass leading to a long mashed-up kiss still happening between tires and concrete: look at these long dark skid marks.

I squat in the spiraling snow, put my fingertips on one of them. I look straight ahead, unfocus my eyes. Mountain shapes blur. I trade fingertips for an open palm.

_Still warm, a little._

I get up, run to the edge of this road’s dangerous curve.

I can see it---this body, loose yet gangling, spread and sprawling its way over an upward arc.

He’s down below--- _he_ \---caught on a massive flank of deadwood. Stretched. Drawn and quartered maybe, it’s like that, or it could be. It would be, with horses or engines and a will. One spindly body balanced on twisted tines of wood. Four limbs humming together in a chord of pain.

A splash of blood covers his mouth and chin. It’s still bright red. There’s still steam rising up off it.

“Hello?”

A faint twitch jerks through him. It ripples, vibrates through tight muscles the way cables on a bridge do.

“Hey! HEY!” I catch my breath, put a foot up on the concrete barrier. I lean over, cup hands around my mouth. “I see you!”

A spread-open chest laboring in fits and starts against gravity.

_Both lungs are still onboard. Respiration appears symmetrical, even at a distance; his diaphragm’s freaking out, sure, it’s spazzing here there and everywhere, but it’s taken quite a licking and to be honest it’s pretty miraculous that it’s still ticking._

“Down there in the dead tree! Hey!”

I begin the meticulous climb downward.

“I see you!”

I hold my arms out, slide on the last of the scree, use that instability to my advantage; I land on my feet, rocks cracking together and amplified to an echo.

Up close, it’s obvious. The ragdoll-fling, a long trajectory, just enough spring left in the old wood to act like shocks on a car. Twisting cracks haired-up with splinters brag about the weak areas, spell out all the ways in which the tree forgave the thrust of his dynamic weight.

_I’ve got a white male here between eighteen and twenty years of age, approximately six feet tall, perhaps one hundred seventy pounds naked plus another fifteen or so on account of assorted bits of motorcycle gear._

I duck branches, weave my way through them.

“You alive?”

I handle their quivering thickness; the friable wood thrums with the rhythm of his breath.

He licks his lips.

_Dislocated left hip plus apparent lower leg fracture; potentially spiral due to foot position but likely greenstick. Lower leg swelling is consistent with a simpler break. Estimated location at this time is distal fibula. There’s no evidence of a compound fracture._

“Dead guys don’t cough, so.”

_Impalement injury left shoulder approximately five centimeters in diameter, wooden object in situ, unsure if supra or subclavian. Full thickness penetration of trapezius, levator scapulae, deltoid, pectoralis major. Potential rib fracture. Potential clavicular fracture. No apparent pulmonary trauma._

He screams.

I flinch, a hot pulse of adrenaline loosening me up and making my bones quake.

_Good._


	3. the seven sisters

_\---I was wondering if you were conscious and alert I guess that’s a big yes huh_

Harold’s mind muscles itself back together just enough to translate voice-input into thought; he sands the mystique off as much as he can but she’s still inside him like a mouthful of fragrant wood, resinous and yielding---he imagines a glint of strong summer light pouring through acacia honey, dark as amber, its thick floral flavor exploding into bittersweet caramel upon the tongue.

His mouth waters.

_\---my name is Naomi Coen, I was riding this road in search of supplies when I found your bike wreckage_

She smells like skin heat, animal fur, traces of palo santo.

_\---I’m a doctor, I can help you_

Harold’s eyes focus. White blur sharpens into cloud texture. Her breath billows up, crosses the left corner of his vision. It’s still snowing.

“Hi,” he says.

“Are you allergic to morphine?”

“No,” he whispers.

“How about Zofran?”

He turns his head and sees the pink under her skin first; it’s driven there by persistent cold, she’s got pale skin and the kind of light transparent freckles that aren’t visible until you’re close enough to hug. A small cluster of them hovers underneath her right eye, darker than the others, a constellation---he traces them with his gaze and thinks _pleiades, the seven sisters. On the rise and at the mercy of a long twilight, her mouth a storm-flushed horizon_.

Her lips---not full, not narrow, but sharp and reddened and shapely---stretch into a smile. She shows him her row of gleaming white upper middle-class girl teeth.

_Red sky at night_ , his mind sing-songs. _Sailor’s delight_.

“That’s an anti-nausea med,” she says.

With effort, he lifts his eyes.

“Skinny boy has nice prominent veins.”

She giggles, a soft secret sound addressed only to herself; her eyes are long and deep and black as night, bold eyebrows restless wing-shadows climbing a pink-lit pavement. She picks up his droopy hand and cradles it like a long-ago prince proposing marriage and he thinks of olive groves in bloom and dusked rivers and ravens croaking their way over the shore of a wine-dark sea and the narcotic feeling of _calm eyes that seem to know everything, the eyes of a very young girl in a Victorian painting, a girl who knows too much perhaps about her father---_

She lifts his knuckles close to her mouth.

For a hot disorienting second he waits, his lower belly gone tight and trembling, for her lips to descend.

She palms his forearm, looks down the back of his wrist.

“This is great.”

His eyes shadow the work of her fingers. With an absent-minded gentleness, she returns his hand to its limp swing; she unshoulders, unzips, reaches into one of those cutesy fucking Fjällräven Kånken bags that any girl who was anyone in his senior year of high school carried around; this one’s a sugary purple, lab-grown grape and battered around the edges, smudged in the face with high mountain dust.

“Nadine’s the girl in the painting,” he mutters.

She hauls out a jumbled handful of plastic-wrapped tubing, foil-pack alcohol wipes, gauze, syringe components.

“I’m sorry…” Naomi's heavy black brows furrow. “What?”

_Even if she can change skins like a succubus, could come in more forms than her own…_ Harold shakes his head. His eyes search her magnificence of black hair; it’s tied on top of her head, thick and curly. There’s a thick streak of silver where a side part would be; smaller streaks scatter out like white ribbons. _This isn’t Nadine_.

She lifts her gaze, settles it hot and heavy on his face.

He turns his head; he can’t bear the night sky in her eyes.

“You allergic to Zofran?”


	4. book of scars

His long hands are like an aerial view; you can see every place water ever whispered along the floor of a white valley laid bare and begging.

“I’m gonna tap this vein.”

While it’s easiest to touch each vein, to feel the way it rolls underneath such tight skin, it’s hard not to _look_ ; here are tracks of blood made blue as water by gatekeepers of epidermis and fat.

“I’m gonna take care of your pain.”

Cloaking red heat in disguise. Blood as an occulted current, no short wavelengths of light allowed.

I pull on gloves and rip open an alcohol wipe; I stroke the long back of a vein-curve, everything evaporates so fast here.

He mutters beneath fits and starts of breath, his voice unstrung, words coming out in bits and parts; I look up and watch his lips move--- _a rich pink, no sign of hypoxia_ \---the mechanisms of his throat braid and lift and bob--- _no sign of obstruction or impairment_.

I look past his incarnation as a book of scars---a history laid by others, those yet to be written by my hand---and I see a trembling brow that’s gone too long without a mother’s kiss, eyes like trapped animals that understand what is happening to them, a throat like a spooked horse restrained---with immense effort---at the brink of bolting.

“What’s your name?”

I rub a numbing agent into his skin.

He whispers something through his chattering teeth.

“I’m sorry?” I push the needle in, ease the catheter into place. I pull the needle out, let it fall to the ground. “I didn’t catch that.”

“I’m hallucinating you,” he whispers.

I tape the catheter down. “You’re not.”

He looks at me, his smear of bright red blood a shock on his translucent skin. The harsh whitened light shrinks his pupils down to pinpoints--- _display an appropriate level of reactivity_ \---and show irises the color of a northern ocean on a moody overcast day; their focus is slippery, scattered, struggling.

I attach tubing.

He tracks it with his jittery gaze.

I reach up, hang the bag of saline from a nearby branch. “Trippy as this probably seems, it’s not a hallucination.”

“Are you…” His voice rustles out of a whisper, stays low and rumbling and grim. “Here to kill me?”

“Nope.” I load a syringe with a dose of morphine and cap the needle, look in his eyes. I slide the syringe behind my ear. “I’m going to take care of your pain.” I pick up my stethoscope and tuck it into my ears. “Then I’m going to treat your injuries.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a doctor.” I listen to the swift strong thud of his heart. “That’s what I do.”

“But...where are you from?” He studies my fingers. “Whose side are you on?”

“Shhhhh.” I listen for breath sounds. “I’m from Vermont.”

“That’s not what I---”

“And I’m on the side of Hippocrates.” I take down the morphine syringe. I uncap it. I glance at his eyes. “You gonna tell me your name?”

He watches me slide the needle into the IV port, thumb the plunger. “Harold.”

“Now that’s better, Harold.” I look up, watch his face. “Isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” His pupils unwind. His face slackens. His whole body sags. “That’s better.”

“Great.” I pull out the syringe, let it drop. “I’m happy to hear that.” I fill a second syringe with Zofran. “Feel pukey yet?”

“Uh...” Sweat forms a thin sheen at his temples and his breathing deepens. His brows twitch. “Yeah.” He jerks as if out of a dream, eyes cracking open. “Um---yes!”

“Hold on, here it comes.” I ease the Zofran in. “It’s on the way.”

His throat convulses.

“That better?”

“Yes,” he sighs.

“You still with me, Harold?”

**Author's Note:**

> harold is 18 in this fic
> 
> i'm sorry, i just cannot take owen teague as a 16-year-old seriously


End file.
